Putting African Communitarian Values to the Test during a Pandemic

Abstract

Abstract Some African scholars have challenged the idea that African societies are still communitarian largely due to urbanisation and cosmopolitanism. Using Ghana as a case study, this essay aims to address this protest by analysing the speeches of the president of Ghana and some of the attitudes and behaviours of Ghanaians during the lockdown days of the COVID 19 pandemic in Ghana to test African communitarian status. The essay deploys the ideological analysis method of rhetorical criticism to examine and analyse the speeches of the president of Ghana on updates to the enhanced responses to the COVID 19 pandemic and content analysis of newspapers and online news portals to analyse the attitudes and behaviours of Ghanaians during the lockdown days of the pandemic. It is observed that the speeches of the president and some of the attitudes of Ghanaians during the lockdown inherently lean toward and are consistent with African communitarianism rather than hard-core liberalism and collectivism.